Sunday Reset – The week to come

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with this blog page – whether to make it a focal point for material that inspires (or provokes) me as a writer, a diary account of my writing career, a hub for discussion of speculative fiction topics, or some combination of the three.

Over time I expect to settle into a pattern. In the meantime I hope you’ll forgive a little creative floundering. It’s my core strength, after all.

The Sunday Reset

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve lost a lot of writing momentum. No big deal, it comes and goes. (This month I blame the dire heat wave that has plagued Canberra and most of the rest of Australia during what appears to be yet another record-breaking February).

When I’m at a creative low ebb, I do a lot of thinking about my writing process. It’s a great procrastination channel. I say “thinking”, but fretting is a better word. Did I really do as much as I could have this week? Did I focus on the most important work? Could I have spent less time on Twitter and more on writing?

Like most writers, I can indulge in unproductive self-recrimination at an Olympic level [1]. I can easily write off whole weeks in beating myself up about what I didn’t get done the previous week. The whole thing usually spirals down from there.

In an effort to break out of that kind of loop – and in my case it takes a conscious effort – something that seems to work for me is to establish a new routine. In that spirit, I’ve started dedicating time on Sunday mornings to setting out a plan for the week’s writing: setting priorities, brainstorming ideas and figuring out some targets.

Implicit in the Sunday planning session is that the past week is dead and gone. On Sunday, I draw a line under whatever I did or didn’t get done, and look forward.

What’s feeding my writer-brain?

With questions of creative productivity swirling around my brain like the grimly hilarious Police song I’m listening to as I write this [2], it’s not surprising that essays on the subject have caught my eye. Here are a few of the best ones I read this week:

Kameron Hurley is a writer with a work ethic so far beyond mine that I can’t even aspire to it; I just stare in slack-jawed awe like an bone-wielding ape in Monolith Country.

Here she talks about her technique of writing the end of her story early in the writing process so that she always knows what she’s aiming for. In its current draft, my work in progress falls completely apart at the end. It would have benefited enormously from this approach. It’s one I’ll keep in mind in future:

Alis Franklin, another prolific writer (and Canberra local) shared her technique for snatching writing time from every possible moment of the day, by writing on a phone synced with a cloud storage option like Dropbox. I’m not sure this is a good option for me at the moment – I actively dislike writing *anything* on my phone and I don’t carry my tablet with me everywhere – but I like Alis’ problem-solving focus:

Peter M Ball has been on a roll this month, delving into the various preoccupations of the developing writer. This week he got stuck into practical approaches to finishing projects. I found the whole thing to be an essential reality-check, but the following passage could so easily have been lifted directly from my brain that I have started wearing a tinfoil hat [3]: